The real superman will be a BETTER man, a man of tenderness
and chivalry, of loyalty and self-control, a man of disciplined heart
and purified will; to attain to such a supermanliness is, indeed, a heroic
and splendid achievement, worthy of our utmost endeavor, and calling
into play all our noblest powers.
Some there are, accustomed to the vision of tables of stone engraved
by the hand of God and set up for man's obedience amid Sinaitic thunders,
for whom the discovery of the humble human and prehuman origin, and
the stumbling hit-or-miss evolution, of morality dulls its sanctity.
But any one who is tempted for this reason to deride morality may console
himself with the reflection that everything else of supreme importance
in human life is of plebeian ancestry. Reason, art, government,
religion, had their crude and superstition-ridden beginnings. Man
himself was once hardly different from a monkey. Yet there is a spark
of the divine in him and in all these arts and institutions which he
with the aid of the cosmic forces has evolved. Surely a juster judgment
may find a sublimity in this age-long march from the clod toward the
millennium that could never belong to the spectacular but very
provincial myths of the Semites. The emotions ever lag behind the
intellect; and our hearts may still yearn for the neighborly and
passionate battle-god of the Pentateuch. Moreover, we shall continue
to recognize a vast fund of truth and insight in those early folk tales
and primitive codes.
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